Thomas Kurtz, Co-Creator of Computer Language Basic, Dies at 96

[ricardo_sdl]

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/co ... ies-at-96/

[BarryG]

RIP.

[spikey]

Thank you, Professor Kurtz. Many people owe you much.

[ricardo_sdl]

Why fred chose Basic for his new language/compiler?

[Quin]

Why fred chose Basic for his new language/compiler?

...What? PureBasic has been basic since its inception over 25 years ago, as has SpiderBasic since its birth over 10 years ago. What are you on about?

[ricardo_sdl]

I mean in 1998. Why he chose Basic as the basis for purebasic.

[BarryG]

I mean in 1998. Why he chose Basic as the basis for purebasic.

See the history section here -> http://www.purearea.net/pb/english/interview.htm

[tj1010]

BASIC was the fastest prototyping and production solution for a solo coder. This was even more obvious in the eighties and nineties and early two-thousands..

I use to do stuff in QBASIC and Omikron BASIC during 8bit era; mostly games and tooling and some TCP/IP>FOSS stuff. In the time a solo 1337 coder took to put out 1k lines of C that was full of stack and heap bugs I had multiple products going to publishers that just worked..

[Fred]

RIP, inventing BASIC was really a game changer for a lot of people !

[TI-994A]

Without BASIC, I would have never entered the field of programming.

Thank you dear fellow, and RIP.

Code: Select all

End

[mk-soft]

Basic was also my first language with the Zinclair ZX81 and with these also ASM.

My first PC was an IBN clone (16bit with 640MB and two 5-1/4 discs without HD) with DOS 3.0 and Basic. Here I got Pascal from somewhere.
Here I tried Windows 1.04. But I found GEM better.
Then Window 3.10 with Profan 4.5, with which you could still write 16-bit Windows applications.

Tried various compilers for X86.
But then found Purebasic v3.x in a computer shop

Basic is a simple language.
New programming languages are also trying to get away from the complexity and achieve the simplicity of Basic.

[threedslider]

RIP to Thomas ...

I have used a bit GFA Basic on Atari 1040 ST but not much, later I have discovered C++ in 1996/1998 and then adopted until now

Later I have rediscovered Purebasic 5.x and fast adopted too, it is a compiler very cool and awesome too And I think Purebasic is the best basic compiler

Fred has done a very great job, thanks to him and his team !!

[Piero]

May he RUN in Heaven

[DeanH]

Basic had a huge impact on programming until about 20 years ago. Gates and Allen adopted it for good reason. Kurtz's contribution cannot be underestimated. It was huge. It brought some real language to programming, something sadly missed now. Pascal and C were/are not real languages.

I started out with Fortran in 1969, then WPL, then HP Basic, then TRS-80 and CoCo Basics which were similar to GWBasic and Quick Basic and MSX. I worked with several 8-bit systems in the 80's, each having their own dialect. I eventually "settled" on ZBasic in the 90's then GFA Basic and Liberty Basic. Checked out many others before D-Lib introduced me to PureBasic 4.

Like others, I can write a program in Basic far more quickly and more easily than with any other language. Why work so hard and take so long?
The prejudice against Basic is undeserved but is right up there with all the other aspects of "computer racism".

As far as I know, no one developed a Basic-like script add-on for browsers. That would have been far better than JavaScript. I feel Mickeysoft missed an opportunity.

[idle]

10 PRINT "THOMAS RULES"
20 GOTO 10